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Two-Day Racial Terror Spree by Group With Guns Driving Pickup Trucks with Confederate Flags
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Police Chose to Not Immediately Arrest Group
A Georgia couple has been sentenced for their role in a 2015 attack on an 8-year old’s birthday party. Jose Torres, 26, and Kayla Norton, 25, were part of a group that for two days drove in a caravan of pickup trucks with Confederate flags mounted on them, shouting racial slurs and making armed death threats. The group, called Respect the Flag, attacked Black families outside of Atlanta in the weeks following the infamous mass shooting by a white supremacist in a Charleston, South Carolina church that left nine Black parishioners at a Bible study class dead.
“Several members of the group — some of whom are now serving prison terms of their own — got out of their trucks and approached the partygoers, threatening to kill them all,” NPR reports. “According to their fellow defendants and witnesses, it was Norton who retrieved Torres’ shotgun — a tactical 12-gauge with a pistol grip — and loaded it before giving it to him.”
Norton and Torres, who are not married, have three children together. Prosecutors say they were part of a gang of white supremacists who targeted African-Americans with racist taunts and threatened to murder minorities.
“At one point, the group pulled up to a birthday party for a black child in Douglasville. The group’s members allegedly threatened to kill the partygoers, with Torres confronting the family with a gun that Norton had loaded. The family called the police,” ABC News reports.
Torres was sentenced to 20 years, Norton to 15. Both were “charged with aggravated assault, terroristic threats and violation of the state’s Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act.”
Stating that they had been “motivated by racial hatred,” Superior Court Judge William McClain declared their actions a hate crime.
The Southern Poverty Law Center posted this video:
Judge McClain also “called into question the Douglasville Police Department’s decision not to arrest any of the ‘Respect the Flag’ group that day. He called it ‘inexplicable’ and ‘a very bad mistake,'” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.